Veriable power blasters

[Lostboy]

In TESB during the empires ground assault of hoth general vears ATAT redirects it's fire to knock out the rebel power generator, vears says "Target maximum firepower." and the fire emitted from the ATATs cannons becomes a massive blast that dwarfs any previous blasts from the same cannons.

I have searched but there appears to be no rules regarding this. Dose anyone have any rules for this or comments about this.

[Gry Sarth]

The only applicable example from the official rules I can think of is the Power Control optional rule on page 25 of The Far Orbit Project. It describes rerouting power from one system to make the other more powerful, such as taking power from the engines or shields to add damage to your lasers.
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[garhkal]

While i have seen nothng official, i did see this posted once elsewhere.

Variable power.
Normal shots at normal damage
taking 1d from shields adds +2 to damage
taking 2d from shields adds 1d+1 to damage
Taking 3d from shields adds 2d damage
taking 2 from move adds 1 to damage
taking 4 from move adds 2 to damage
taking 6 (the most) adds 3 to damage
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[Rerun941]

Could that AT-ATs shots have also been a combined fire bonus?

I'd have to look up the AT-AT weapon stats again, but if memory serves, the "chin" and "ear" weapons normaly fire independently. When the General gives the call "Target: maximum firepower!" he's making a command roll for combined weapons fire.

Hence the increase in damage from the combined fire rules.
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[Lostboy]

True rerun true but the blasts from the chin gun are visible more powerful than preveus blasts from the same cannons where, that is not just more guns firing the chin guns have gotten a massive boost in power for that shot.

[jmanski]

Maybe they charge up for a round or two for more damage. I remember seeing a variable damage blaster, don't recall if it was home-brew or not, though.

'Course, that could have just been a theatrical thing to add importance to the shot and to look cooler, too.
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[Delkarnu]

I could definitely see dropping the fire rate to 1/2 for it to build up power and get a D or two of extra damage.

I'd make the extra D go to mishap tables on 1s, no bonus of 6s, that way players don't go for the additional power all the time, just when it is really needed.
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[garhkal]

Kind of like with jury rigging
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[vong]

yea, ive always wanted to see what a setup would look like where a ship has 10D in power.

Then you distribute it to guns / engines / shields as you see fit. not sure on how it would work though.
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[jmanski]

So.....

If you have a freighter with 5d power, say, and you add a second laser cannon. You can:
A) add more power to shoot two lasers at once
B) divert power to one laser at a time
C) divert power from shields (or whatever) to fire both lasers

Hhmmmm. How do you figure out how much power a typical ship (unmodified, of course) has?
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[garhkal]

Back when i was in england, someone there called magestones had this massive chart of how to build a ship inc power requirements and such. So if you wanted to add more on to it, you had to refigure out the power requirements... so to me if you had a baseline power output, you could say make a jury rig roll on the spot to get more juice out of it for a little time (say 2d rounds) which can then be reassigned.
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[vong]

[Orion]

I like vong's concept and will at some point look into doing something along those lines, but as I am already working on a few projects, it would just sit on the back burner right now. However, I thought I might share the outline of the my idea so that someone else might be able to get some inspiration from it.

The easiest place to start seems to be with the Power Control rules in Far Orbit. They state that a ship has enough power to power all of it's systems simultaneously and enough carrying capacity to pass an extra 2D to any system. They also suggest that the reason a ship going all-out cannot fire is due to power limitations and even suggest that they may not be able to use shields either. So this gives us some limiting factors.

First we add up all the weapon damage dice and shield dice, this is the easy part.

Next we need to come up with a power expenditure for movement perhaps converting space movement back to dice using the chart, I seem to remember someone mentioning somewhere on this forum, or by simply assigning X number of space to 1 pip of power. This will require looking at a broad number of ships to get it balanced. A ship needs enough power to reach it's maximum speed, but not have a lot left over.

Now we can think about tertiary systems, such as Life Support, Nav-Comps, and Inertial Dampers. Including these systems will mean we will have to come up with penalties for under powering them.

- Life Support probably uses more power than you think, because it's not only providing air and water, but more importantly heat in a vary cold environment. Lowering the heat could cause other systems to fail, since electronics are very temperature sensitive on the whole.

- Nav-Comps and computers in general don't use vary much power at idle, but the more they do the more power they need, so a Nav-Comp making calcs for lightspeed is going to be using a fair amount of power as those calcs are very complex. Under powering it will at least prolong the time it takes to make the calcs and may even cause errors in them. We might even consider power requirements for fire control computers.

- Inertial Dampers are for undoing G-forces, so you can make the argument that they require more power the faster you go, because the G-forces will be higher when preforming maneuvers at those speeds, for simplicities sake we will say that need to be powered up to the appropriate level, ahead of time, in order to undo those G's on demand. This allows us to use them to limit power usage for other things at higher speeds and under powering them can mean stress damage to other systems.

As you can see it's very basic and rough, and will require a lot of reasearch into the various ships to fine tune it, but it's a place to start if someone wants to look into it.

[vong]

cool. its defiantly a good start.
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[Orion]

Thanks, it's basically just off the top of my head.

The difficult part, as far as I can ascertain, will be balancing things so that power will start fading at the appropriate point, and, of course, deciding exactly where that point should be.